A guest who can read your menu orders more, asks less, and comes back. Scanqur lets you publish one menu in six languages, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and German, with true right-to-left rendering, switched by the guest in one tap.
Riad Zeytoun
العربية · English · Français
A tourist opens a menu they can’t read and switches to survival mode: they order the one word they recognise, skip the starters, skip dessert, and ask the busy waiter three questions along the way. They don’t complain, they just spend less and don’t return. Multiply that by every foreign guest of the season and the untranslated menu becomes one of the quietest revenue leaks in the business.
Printing a menu per language means multiplied costs, tables cluttered with booklets, and versions drifting out of sync at every price change. A digital menu removes the constraint entirely: one menu, several languages, one QR code, and every language updates together because they are one catalog underneath.
Your products and categories carry names and descriptions per language. Guests scanning your QR code get a language switcher and read the whole menu (navigation, categories, dishes) in the language they pick. Prices, photos and availability stay shared, so nothing can drift out of sync.
Any merchant whose guests don’t all share one language:
A stapled translation from three summers ago, with last year’s prices and none of the new dishes. Guests notice the difference in care.
Machine-translating a photographed menu produces comedy, not confidence. "Grilled lamb of the atlas" becomes something nobody orders.
Most menu tools bolt Arabic text onto left-to-right layouts: misaligned, wrongly ordered, visibly broken. Arabic readers deserve a menu built for their script.
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and German. Guests switch instantly; your menu structure, photos and prices remain identical across all of them.
Arabic isn’t translated text squeezed into a Western layout. The entire menu mirrors correctly, from navigation to product cards.
Change a price once and it changes in every language. Hide a dish and it hides everywhere. One catalog underneath means zero drift.
Menus imported with the AI scanner arrive as structured items, so adding a language is filling fields, not rebuilding a document.
Listen to your room for a week. Two well-maintained languages beat five neglected ones, and you can always add more later.
Start with your top 15 dishes and category names. That covers most of what most guests order, and the menu is usable in the new language immediately.
Tip: Keep proper dish names ("Tajine Zeytoun") and translate the description underneath. Guests enjoy authentic names when the explanation is readable.
Allergens, spice levels, "vegetarian": these words do the most work for a foreign guest. Get them right in every language you offer.
Switch through every language on your own phone, especially Arabic, checking the RTL layout end to end. Scanqur handles the mirroring; you check the words.
The language switcher is right on the menu, so discovery is automatic. A small flag row on your table tents ("EN · FR · ES · AR") turns it into a selling point before the scan.
Have a native speaker read each language
One coffee with a native-speaking friend catches everything embarrassing. Your menu is your storefront in that language.
Update all languages in the same sitting
New dish, new description, add its translations immediately. "I’ll translate it later" is how menus drift.
Keep descriptions concrete everywhere
Ingredient-based descriptions translate cleanly. Poetry ("a symphony of the sea") translates into confusion.
Don’t machine-translate and walk away
Automatic translation is a draft, not a result. Review it, dish names and culinary terms are exactly where machines stumble.
Don’t translate the untranslatable
Paella is paella in every language. Translate around signature names, not through them.
Don’t launch a language you won’t maintain
An out-of-date translation quietly serves wrong information in a language you don’t check. Offer what you can keep current.
Salma’s riad restaurant hosts French tourists, Gulf visitors, Spanish tour groups and local regulars, often on the same evening. She ran three printed menus: French, a worn English copy, and Arabic. They disagreed on two prices, and the Spanish guests had none at all.
She imported her menu into Scanqur with the AI scanner, then spent two evenings adding English, Spanish and Arabic names and descriptions to her French base, bestsellers first. The Arabic version rendered right-to-left properly, which she checked with her chef, a native reader who had cringed at previous "Arabic" menus.
Now one QR code on each table serves all four audiences. Gulf guests browse in Arabic without asking, the Spanish groups stopped ordering blind, and when she raises a price it changes in four languages at once. The three drifting paper menus retired the same week.
Her measure of success is simple: "The waiters answer questions about the food now, not about the words."
4
languages behind one QR code
2
evenings to translate the essentials
0
out-of-sync menus since
Multilingual menus combine naturally with these features.
Replace your paper menu with a digital one: add your dishes, pick a theme, print the code. The complete guide, free.
Read articlePick a theme, add your logo, colors and header image. A menu that looks like your restaurant, no designer needed.
Read articleScanqur’s AI scanner extracts your categories, dishes and prices from a photo, so you skip an afternoon of retyping.
Read articleAdd your languages to your Scanqur menu tonight, and tomorrow’s tourists order dessert too. Free to start.
Scanqur menus are browsed in six languages, every day, from one QR code per merchant.